


Rotting on the Vine

by fairbreeze



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-30
Updated: 2011-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-28 12:58:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairbreeze/pseuds/fairbreeze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no delicate way to eat an orange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rotting on the Vine

**Author's Note:**

> Stole the title from a song from “Music from the Succubus Club”, which I have always found to be a really evocative title to a not really great (but not bad) song. Although this fic contains spoilers for the Circus Arc manga, you do not need to know anything about the manga to read it.
> 
> This fic contains eroticized gore involving a minor.

\---

Oranges, he thinks, are interesting fruits, sweet and tart at the same time, messy.

Impossible to peel one open and not stain your hands, to pluck tender morsels out of the center without having to lick off juice, without getting it all over your mouth, fingers. There was no delicate way to eat an orange, though he watched Sebastian peel one with all the care he could hope for, split the skin and roll the fruit in his hand, the rind coming off in a perfect spiral, no chance of him cutting himself or into the orange, even with the sway of the train.

He does not think it will taste like much, this orange, bought from a little girl selling them for so cheap he has to wonder if she’s stolen them. Not that he even knows what an orange costs, he thinks, not really. His butler sees to all that. But the flavor explodes across his tongue, perfect bittersweetness, and he does not miss the subtle sharpening of Sebastian’s eyes, when he licks his fingers and takes the next piece.

It is not the first time he has seen the demon look hungry.

\---

It is remarkably easy, he thinks, to learn to kill.

It isn’t that he hasn’t given the order before, but there is always a removal from the killing, in the same way that the steak he cuts into at dinner does not, in his head, resemble a cow.

He is surprised at how easy it is, when the gun kicks in his hand and Baron Kelvin goes down, blood pooling on the ground beneath him. He feels nothing, nothing aside from the same hatred, smoldering deep down inside him, that he has felt since the day he learned what it was to know _fire_. Even more surprising, how easy it is to order Sebastian, once he knows the truth of the matter, to cleanse the entire place, the living and the dead, the innocent and the guilty.

He tells Sebastian that it was a kind of compassion, to kill the children and, in a way, it is the truth. Before Sebastian rescued him (guarded him, chained him to death), he prayed to God for freedom. But when it was obvious there was no freedom, he prayed instead for death, with all of his heart and soul. It was only when it became obvious that there was no death, only an endless number of days of rape and starvation and pain, that he began to pray for something else. And he knows that it is unlikely that those children’s prayers would have been answered, as he says.

But it was not for that reason that he ordered the butler to burn everything.

 _He wanted to see if he could._

He wanted to order something horrendous, monstrous, beyond even what a demon would expect of him, beyond the mercy even a demon would give, to see if he _could_ , to see if the order would stick in his throat, pull him down into hell from the very uttering of it. He had felt as though he would come apart, literally have his lungs rip through his own chest, putrid and bile-ridden, burst like a rotted fruit and spill to the floor. He was disgusting, as disgusting as the thing that held him, used and humiliated and never worth saving to begin with, and he wanted to _prove_ it.

And now, he sat on the train, the picture of a young, cold nobleman, and licked the sweet (and the sour) from his fingers and ate another slice, looking out the window.

Now that it was over, done, only one last, small thing to do, like putting flowers on a grave, he found that he really felt no different. Shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he _feel_ something, after what he had done?

He feels nothing. Nothing at all.

\---

He dreams of Sebastian peeling back his layers, like an orange, to get to the sweet meat beneath, scraping the pith of his tendons and what little fat he had away, leaving only muscle and blood and organs. He dreams of that tongue inside him, laving the blood away from his heart before biting, vicious. In his dreams there is pain, there is always pain, but it is always bearable, never takes away from the breathtaking intimacy of it. There is never the feeling of dying, except as a dim, distant thing, as though this is the foreplay, death the climax, still far away, but encroaching, coming, inevitable. He dreams Sebastian a mostly fastidious eater. There is no way to not be messy, but he tries, butler to the last, little, teasing bites of him, mouth stained crimson, hands red as sin, but every inch the rest of him pristine, the only note of gluttony about him the sounds he makes as he eats, slurping, wet things that Ciel can hear over the sound of his own labored (slowing) breaths.

He wakes from the dream the first time and for a horrifying (wonderful) moment, he thinks the warmth on his sheets, his chest, his thighs, is blood.


End file.
